The Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has refused to investigate allegations that chemical weapons have been used to attack an American in Latin America. Janet Phelan is a journalist and author who fled the US following the cover-up of the murder of her mother, Dr. Amalie Phelan. Her book EXILE detailing the impetus of this murder, a book that names names and points to a deeply embedded and covert racial agenda within the US government, was published in 2014. At that point she says she began to experience considerable chemical weapons assaults in several countries in Latin America, as well as on a trip to Switzerland and Germany in 2016.

Janet Phelan has stated that she has been assaulted, while sleeping, with Riot Control agents as well as with an aerosol weapon that causes severe cardiac pain. She has reported now sleeping with a gas mask on. Her medical records indicate severe organ damage consonant with chemical weapons attacks.

Former NSA Analyst, Karen Stewart, and a number of others, including lawyers and activists, had sent letters into the national authorities in Mexico, detailing the nature of the assaults and asking for an investigation. These letters went to the Ministry of Exterior Relations as well as the Secretary of Defense and to the Mexican Embassy in D.C. Stewart states that no acknowledgement or reply was ever received.

Stewart then contacted the OPCW in the Netherlands, asking for an investigation.

In reply to Karen Stewart, the Public Affairs Office of the OPCW wrote the following on April 18, 2019:

Dear Ms. Stewart,

In response to your email, we reiterate that the issues raised go beyond the remit of OPCW Public Affairs.

The OPCW Technical Secretariat does not have the mandate to investigate allegations from individuals. Individuals must contact their national authorities and/or local law enforcement.

Please note that National Authorities have the mission to implement the obligations of a State Party to the Chemical Weapons Convention at the national level.

Stewart responded pointing out that proof was supplied that the national authorities are ignoring the complaint. She also questioned the reasoning behind asking for assistance from the perpetrating government.

“So, you advised Janet to take her complaint to the very authorities trying to kill her?” “When we show you that we have, and were ignored, you can only give her the very same worthless advice?”

The Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into force in 1993, governs the destruction of chemical stockpiles and prohibits the retention of chemical weapons. The Convention states the following:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never under any circumstances:

a) To develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain, chemical weapons or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone;
b) To use chemical weapons;
c) To engage in any military preparations to use military weapons;
d) To insist, encourage or induce, in anyway, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.

While the focus of the CWC is on the use of chemical weapons in international warfare, precedent exists to investigate claims of individual non combatants. When Syrian non combatants were assaulted by gas weapons, the CWC promptly sent a Fact Finding team to investigate the genesis of the attack. In 2018, the OPCW was given new powers to not only investigate and determine if a chemical weapon was used, but also to determine by whom. These enhanced powers, used as a tool in Syria, set precedent for individual non combatants to request investigations should they be assaulted within the borders by government forces.

Targeted chemical weapons attacks against non combatants, while rare, have been reported by other activists in the Western hemisphere. Jeannie Tanaka, a former attorney for the State of California, has sent in a report to the FBI on similar attacks, having caught a number of them on surveillance video. In Texas, Linda Kathryn Johnson also reported chemical weapons attacks and a lab report concluded that organophosphates had been the culprit. Carol Warner the daughter of former CIA counsel John Warner and a psychotherapist who has treated MK ULTRA victims, has also claimed that she was attacked by a chemical weapon on more than one occasion. Warner’s book, Return, Dreaming and the Psychospiritual Journey, was published in 2017.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has refused to accept physical evidence of chemical weapons secured by Phelan. A European NGO, Ecoterra, also contacted more than one lab asking for their assistance in analyzing the evidence and was similarly refused.

Janet Phelan’s journalism has focused on uncovering corruption of public officials as well as bringing to light concerns surrounding an apparent covert biological weapons agenda within the US government. She sits on the board of an NGO, ITHACA, which has brought attention to the UN to the evidence that the US government has violated the Biological Weapons Convention in a number of ways, and has published blueprints of what appears to be a biological weapons delivery system, involving US water systems. ITHACA has also engaged the UN with reports to the Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights record of the US and entered a report to the Special Rapporteur on Torture detailing that the abuses now surfacing in court authorized adult guardianships appear in some cases to violate the Convention Against Torture.

Phelan has stated, “If I were a Syrian, CNN would be parked in front of my house now. The fact that I am a citizen of the ‘leader of the free world’ and that the circumstances which prompted this nightmare were launched by the US makes publication of my plight ‘politically inconvenient’.”